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I like the Doctor. I enjoy watching the Doctor. I shared the Doctor with my family. Now I live with three Whovians.

Doctor Who fans are referred to as Whovians, most often by the American press. The usage was more common among fans in the United States during the 1980s, when the Doctor Who Fan Club of America (pronounced by members as Dwifca – now defunct) published the Whovian Times as its newsletter. It was seldom, if ever, used by the main British or Australian fan groups.

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Our default mode – in and out of the church – seems to be defensiveness. I know mine is. Nothing is more natural when we feel threatened by a criticism than to divert, distract, and downplay. Its as instinctive as flinching when a punch is coming. In my experience, a heart of repentance is something I have to work at. I have to say things like, “wait a minute. Think this through. Why does this criticism hurt you the way it does? Remember your identity is in Christ. Remember you’re identity is not at stake. Relax! Is there something you can learn here?” Its a counter-intuitive feeling, like learning to use a muscle we didn’t know we had for the first time. Or better: learning to relax a muscle for the first time that we’ve always kept tight. Its a kind of paradox: an effort at relaxing, a striving to cease striving, a struggle to give up.

Those were the first words of advice my friend said to my new pastor about me.

So, now the topic is taboo, and we have had one discussion and it was forced. Barriers are established before the conversation started. Trenches were dug. Fences erected. Lanes mined. Grenades stockpiled.

Standoff. Entrenchment.

Other than that topic, we mostly have a really great friendship… other than that deadly no-man’s land between us. Continue reading →

We drove out to Mescalero Sands (off highway vehicle recreation area) Friday afternoon. We do not have any off-road vehicles (well, we do have my Raptor, but getting sick in the sand is not my idea of a good time), so we strolled around in the sand and sun for an hour or so. It is always a nice outing. We have been to Mescalero Sands several times, but this is the first time we actually saw other people there, and the first time we saw off-road vehicles running around in the sand. There are miles and miles and miles of sand dunes in the area, so even though there were several groups with several vehicles each, it was far from crowded.

In a study published online today (December 05, 2008) by the British Medical Journal, scientists from Harvard University and UC San Diego showed that happiness spreads readily through social networks of family members, friends and neighbors.

Knowing someone who is happy makes you 15.3% more likely to be happy yourself, the study found. A happy friend of a friend increases your odds of happiness by 9.8%, and even your neighbor’s sister’s friend can give you a 5.6% boost.

“Your emotional state depends not just on actions and choices that you make, but also on actions and choices of other people, many of which you don’t even know,” said Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and medical sociologist at Harvard who co-wrote the study. Continue reading →

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Apparently, sometime in 2001, we started having a problem with “monsters under the bed” and in the closet of the boys room and in any dark or shady area…. I still remember hiding under the covers with my brother around the age of 5-6, so I was very sympathetic toward the boys. Somewhere along the way, I got the bright idea that we should spray the room for monsters, and “MonstreX Ultra” was born! I was in a hurry, so I grabbed the first background I could find that would do the job, scaled the image to fit the spray bottle we had on hand, printed, cropped, taped, and and sprayed. We left the bottle in the boys room for several weeks. The monsters went away that night!Continue reading →